A while back, I posted a deconstruction of the cover art for the Journey album Escape, hoping that it would be the first in a new series called “Album Covers That Blow My Mind.” Well, a year later, that second entry is finally here! I know, it’s been a while, but don’t worry, it was worth the wait.
Ladies and gentlemen: Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell.
I know, your mind is blown, right? Once you’ve recovered, follow me after the jump to Overthink the Hell out of this.
Peter Fenzel hosts with Matthew Belinkie, Mark Lee, and Dave Shechner to overthink the re-release of Avatar, its implications for the future of 3D movies,and the Tila Tequila incident at the Gathering of the Juggalos. Spoiler alert for the movie Everybody Poops.
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Was I the only person who came out of watching Scott Pilgrim vs the World with the following combination on their mind?
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Yeah, I thought so. Although SPVTW functions as a fantastical application of video game rules and aesthetics into “real life,” I can’t help but to read it as a prescient look into the future of our increasingly videogame-ified culture. And a future where a “pee bar” hovers over someone taking a piss isn’t actually that far-fetched; in fact, most of the basic ingredients for it exist here and now.
While watching Christopher Nolan’s Inception, my mind wast mostly turned to jello from trying to make sense of the movie’s mechanics. Why exactly does the falling van cause weightlessness in the 2nd hotel level, but not the 3rd ice level? Why do they need the fancy dream machines when they’re already inside the dream? What is Christopher Nolan on, and where I can I get myself some of that?
The few solid chunks of brain matter I had remaining, however, asked a far simpler question:
Haven’t any of the characters in this movie seen Total Recall?
Or The Matrix?
I don’t know about you, but if I were an elite dream-hacker who dealt constantly with the possibility that my current state of consciousness was a dream and not reality, I’d be constantly making references to these kinds of movies. Well, part of that’s due to the fact that I’m a pop culture reference kind of guy, but it’s also just how most people--not just Overthinkers--go through our lives and interact with friends: we talk about pop culture together, and we connect events in our lives with related works of pop culture.
Inception is devoid of any such references. For all we know, in the universe of Inception, there are no movies whatsoever, or if there are movies, then these characters have either never seen them or have seen them but never talk about them (on screen). What’s going on? Are they living in some sort of, say, dream world that’s divorced from reality? Well, probably (more on that later). But here’s the interesting thing: movies don’t seem to exist in this world, or at least the characters don’t show any awareness of them, but pop music clearly does, and the characters are aware of this. Hence the prominent use of the Edith Piaf song “Je ne regrette rien.”
So the characters in Inception exhibit zero knowledge of any movies, but they do know at least one pop song that the audience also knows. This got me thinking about how this works in other movies: sometimes, characters make reference to one or two movies; occasionally, they’ll make lots of references, and their actions will be highly influenced by movies they’ve seen.
Likewise, with music, a movie can have zero instances of pop music playing that the characters recognize, a few scattered instances, or multiple instances of characters jamming along to our pop music and being highly influenced by it.
Strangely, though, characters’ knowledge of movies and music function independently in movies. In some movies like Inception, characters can be aware of pop music, but not movies. In higly self-aware movies like Kick-Ass, characters exhibit knowledge of, and are highly influenced by, many movies, while exhibiting no knowledge of in-universe pop music.
Hmm. This calls for a chart. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Overthinking It Pop Culture Awareness in Movies Matrix, or as I like to say, OTIPCAIMM.
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the controversy over the casting of the new M. Night Shyamalan movie, The Last Airbender. Critics contended that Paramount went out of its way to cast white actors in roles that were clearly portrayed as Asian in the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Naturally, Overthinking It’s Only Minority (not to mention Asian) Writer, Lee, was tuned into the controversy like Aang was tuned in with the elements.
Rather than bring you my own analysis (which would have required me to actually watch what is by all accounts a filmic abomination), I turned to a professional instead: Guy Aoki, the Founding President of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans and, along with Mike Le & Marissa Le of the website racebending.com, one of the driving forces behind this boycott. Fresh off organizing a protest agains the movie in Los Angeles, he graciously agreed to answer some questions about the issues behind this campaign and the issues of race and ethnicity in pop culture writ large.
Enjoy, and keep the discussion going in the comments.
Maybe if I hold my skull like this, I can travel back in time and score more goals.
As surely as the seasons come and go, Team USA has once again been eliminated from the World Cup. So before the event falls victim to America’s collective short attention span and fades from the pop culture landscape, let’s Overthink three notable American contributions to the body of World Cup-related pop culture.
1. Attacking the British--and Male Inadequacy--with Mediocre American Muscle Cars
First up is the Dodge Challenger Revolutionary War Advertisement:
As we discussed on this week’s Overthinking It podcast, we all really enjoyed the A-Team for what it was: a fun action movie. With that established, it’s time to dive a little deeper into the political implications of the movie’s admittedly scatter-brained plot, specifically around its attitude towards the government agency everyone loves to hate, the CIA.
Intimidating, isn't it?
For those of you who haven’t seen the new A-Team movie, stop now and drive your GMC van to your local cinema and watch it now. (This is less of a spoiler alert–you’ll see why in a moment, though there are mild spoilers to follow–and more of a plea to help the movie improve its box office performance and its chances at getting a sequel made.)
Based on the number of comments left on last week’s “Karaoke Quotient” article, in which I laid out a mathematical formula for determining the quality of a karaoke song, I can tell there’s a lot of people out there who are passionate about karaoke and the songs they choose to sing. Which is great, except for one thing: the whole point of the Karaoke Formula is that it’s an almost entirely dispassionate way to look at karaoke song choice. It ignores the highly choreographed routine you and your duet partner worked out for “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.” It doesn’t take into account the time you brought down the house with your virtuosic air guitar finale to “One” by Metallica.
But lest we forget, the benefit to this disciplined approach to the topic is that now have some way of answering the question,
“What is the greatest karaoke song of all time?”
After introducing the formula and subjecting it to some degree of public scrutiny, I was ready to feed it a bunch more data and use it to venture an answer to this question. I took a dozen more songs (many of which came up in the comments thread of the original post), crunched the numbers, and was somewhat surprised by the result.
Yikes. I can already hear legions of karaoke pros groaning and screaming in protest.
But before you down a beer and sing “I Hate Everything About You” at me, stick with me while I break down that KQ of 8.9 and see how it scored so high.
Pete Fenzel hosts with Natalie Baseman, Mark Lee, and Jordan Stokes to Overthink our best & worst karaoke experiences, the last part of our 2010 Summer Movies preview, the misleading film titles of Angelina Jolie, and how to decide on a movie when you’re on a date. Don’t blame us when you get dumped over seeing The Expendables.
[A note on the live-stream: we once again experienced technical difficulties (apologies to all of the listeners who got cut off halfway), and as a result, we're re-evaluating our options for next Sunday's recording. Be sure to check our Twitter account for the updated plan come Sunday.]
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